What the heck is wrong with me!

I wasn't hungry for the longest time now i'm sooooo hungry for the last few days.

I just mowed through 8, yes I said 8 almond joy mini bars. Grrrrrr

I logged them and that's 136 grams and 651 calories.

What the heck is wrong with me. I feel sick, not physically but in every other way. ARghhhhhh

Oh and that's after having a 2 piece french toast breakfast with 2 scrambled eggs and bacon.

I know what i'm suppose to eat ..........I am being wrecklace and destructive to myself and I have no idea why. I'm so bummed and sick about this.

EDIT; Oh and now I remember also a 1/2 can of 7up and tortilla chips with cheese dip too.

I'm eating at something. What a frikken binge. I feel discusting. I don't ever remember binging this bad. Wow.

I just logged everything and it comes to 2, 288 calories and 2,000 grams of sodium and wayyyy too much fat and protein and it's only 3:25 in the afternoon.

I know how you feel, I tend to do this too :( I'll be doing good on my diet and then one day I'll just blow it out of the water, usualy on fast food =(

I skimmed through your bio to get a sense of where you are at. You've obviously been through an awful lot in your life and have some challenging issues with anemia and no known diagnosis for a bunch of inflammation (no MS, lupus, TB...)

Unrelated to your direct post (which I'll get to), did your doctors ever look into celiac disease as a possible root cause for your anemia and severe inflammation? Celiac disease is gluten-intolerance (cannot digest wheat, barley, rye). Although doctors are getting better at detecting it, they still often miss it. I had a colleague in hospital told to get his affairs in order before they discovered it was celiac disease. It is easily treated by maintaining a completely gluten-free diet. He was back at work and living a completely normal life. Your equivalent scare with a wrong lupus diagnosis made me think of him. Anemia is one of the primary markers for celiac disease.

In any case, back to your post -- o.k. so at your weight and height when you logged everything, you've only really consumed a maintenance diet amount. Don't panic. How much do you try to restrict your diet usually? Maybe it is too restricted and this has triggered the binge cycle. Even if you get to the end of the day and it's 3,500 calories -- it'll take several days of that to have that even translate into a pound of body weight. Beyond that, you have just come off a prescription and that has also generated an initial appetite suppression that you are now coming off of.

You mention that you walk with a cane and are fairly sedentary so it is extremely difficult to create distractions by being active for you at the moment. Do you like reading, or taking a bath, or love crafts of some sort? See if you can't fit something like that in this evening or sometime tomorrow -- by being nice to yourself it can help short circuit that cycle of I loathe myself for what I have done so I will just do more of it because I feel worthless.

You need to congratulate yourself for being here, for persevering and for making the decision to begin to change the course of your health and life. I congratulate you!

We all have those days that we feel like a bottomless pit and could eat everything put in front of us.  Those are the days that test us the most.  If you are hungry it is okay to eat, but you know mini candy bars probably aren't your wisest choice. 

It's okay to go over your calories from time to time, but do your best to do it with calories that count.  Crackers with some fiber and some laughing cow cheeese, popcorn, fruit, yogurt, low sugar pudding, etc. 

I know how it feels after eating a bunch of crap, it doesn't feel good.  Forgive yourself and start over tomorrow. 

hedgren,

My cousin has celiac spru disease. Her Mom died of Lupus 2 years ago and mine died from breast cancer 4 years ago. So yes i've considered it.

I definately binged and today i'm doing much better. I've had tomatoe soup with saltine crackers and a high protein breakfast. I did have sweets today too but not so much. Seems the more carbs I eat the more I crave.

I'm going to ask my Doctor to test me for the celiac spru. They are thinking it's probably M.S and that test is in December but if it's not then Celiac Spru would definately be considered.

Thanks for your encouragement. I'm done beating myself up. I have been eating way too many carbs and sweets. It's hard when you have a room mate that makes rice crispy treats grrrr like she did last night. I threw the rest of the candies out. Yeah! LOL wasn't many left after I got ahold of them but at least I threw out what was left.

Thanks everyone for your support. :)

I am so glad to hear that today was a better day! If you do decide to get tested for celiac sprue, I have the following information that might help:

There is a genetic typing test that will tell you whether you have the genetic mutations to cause celiac disease (it's a mouth swab test now). It won't tell you whether you have the active disease, but it will tell you if it's possible.

From there there is a blood test that requires you really load up on gluten (pastas, breads and all foods containing wheat, barley and/or rye) for at least three weeks prior. This is hard to do if you have already figured out that it makes you feel miserable. And even if you manage it, the test can be inconclusive as to whether you have it or don't.

If you have a positive blood test then they like to do a small intestine biopsy to confirm damage to the villi. In the US and the UK it is necessary to be a biopsy-confirmed celiac to get tax breaks for the food purchases (Canada does not have these discounts). And the problem with the biopsy is that if there is no damage to the villi they assume no celiac disease which has also been shown to be inaccurate for a good portion of the patients. Here in Canada, many patients simply opt to maintain a gluten-free diet and if their symptoms resolve then they are considered de-facto gluten-intolerant.

I was under the impression that they had already ruled out MS, but perhaps they want to be sure? In any case, congratulations on your better day!

hedgren,

Thanks for all the useful information. I will ask my Doctor about the swab test. No they have not ruled out M.S as of yet. I have an appt with the nuerologist Dec 7th, day before my birthday :) and they will decide what they will test for then. I have already undergone all the tests under the scope of Rhuematology and they have ruled everything out that could be Rhuematic.

I had a endoscopy done about 2 years ago and they never said anything about anything being wrong so wouldn't something show up then when they did that? I don't know how that works.

Thanks for your info.

Unfortunately, both tests for celiac disease have significant rates of false negatives.

The endoscopy with a biopsy can detect whether their is damage to the small intestinal villi (the 'hairs' that move the food through the colon) -- which is one telltale sign of celiac disease. But, they have to be looking in the right place and at the right time. Villi damage occurs only late in the progression of the disease and for many patients their is no damage to the villi at any point in the disease progression (for up to 17% this is believed to be the case).

When they did your endoscopy they may or may not have even been looking for villi damage, and even if they were it isn't a definitive result if it came back negative.

The blood test (as I mentioned) looks for IgG and IgA antibodies. If you haven't been eating high enough doses of gluten in the weeks leading up to the test, you can get a false negative. You can also get a false negative because the disease has progressed to a point where your immune system can no longer mount a reaction to the ingestion of gluten at all (which is the late phases of disease progression).

They are working on better and more accurate testing, likely it will be stool testing but there's nothing in the offing for a while. So, if these next rounds of tests don't seem to provide anything more, then you may want to revisit the idea of trying a gluten-free diet for six weeks and seeing if symptoms resolve. Best of luck and let us know what happens with the next round of tests.

Thanks hedgren...

Sounds indeed difficult to diagnose. I'm going to try and stay away from refined sugars and carbs and stick with grains like you mentioned and see what happens. If i'm feeling different after several months then there must be something going on with this. Thanks.